By demonstrating his ignorance of modern banking, the Reverend Paul Flowers has performed his greatest service to an industry he served disastrously during his tenure as chairman of the Co-op Bank.

Though his evidence on Wednesday lasted for the greater part of three hours, Mr Flowers neatly encapsulated in the first 10 minutes of his testimony to MPs everything that had been wrong, not just with the Co-op but with the wider oversight of banks.

Asked basic questions about the Co-op Bank, Mr Flowers displayed little knowledge of the lender for which he had notionally held responsibility until just five months ago.

Answering further questions on his qualifications to hold the chairmanship, he replied that he had worked for a bank for four years “after leaving school”. The reverend is 63.

From this point on, revelations about political pressure in support of the various disastrous deals the Co-op Bank executed or attempted were rather academic.

Put simply, with men such as Mr Flowers overseeing the bank it was always unlikely to come unstuck at some point, whatever sweet nothings government ministers may or may not have been whispering in the ears of Co-op executives.

His only response to questions of his competence was to point out that regulators had approved his appointment. This, unfortunately, is true and an indictment of the regulatory regime for banks.

Though career bankers have undoubtedly made huge mistakes and overseen their own disasters, the incompetence on display at the Co-op Bank is in a league of its very own.

From hundreds of millions wasted on useless computer systems, to the failure to identify impaired assets for several years after acquiring them, the Co-op Bank’s mismanagement exceeds the more high-profile failures at HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland.

The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards’ recommendation that the current “Approved Person” regime for banks needs to be urgently overhauled cannot happen soon enough.

Those in charge of banks must be able to demonstrate a level of competence that far exceeds a few years working as a junior banker more than 40 years ago.

We have a right to expect that anyone entering the senior ranks of the industry and entrusted with the onerous responsibility of looking after the nation’s wealth will bring a modicum of professionalism to the boardroom table.

Shipyard plight shows BAE’s lack of diversity

Portsmouth has paid a heavy price for the Government’s desire to avoid giving succour to the Scottish Nationalists. Political necessity meant that BAE Systems was always more likely to close shipyards on the south coast instead of those on the Clyde.

But the loss of 1,775 jobs across BAE’s shipbuilding division signals that more tough choices are ahead for Britain’s largest defence contractor. Dramatic cutbacks in defence spending in the

UK and the US, easily the company’s biggest two customers, place into sharper focus the need to diversify.

Put simply, if BAE Systems were a chair it would only stand on one leg. Management goes to great lengths to demonstrate to investors the broad range of the company’s activities, from the production of Typhoon fighter jets to self-propelled artillery, ammunition and even training, but the fact remains that BAE Systems is dangerously vulnerable to cutbacks in defence spending by both Whitehall and the Pentagon.

Targeting more military contracts in the US has, up to now, helped BAE Systems to maintain its position comfortably among the world’s top-five defence companies, just behind Boeing and industry leader Lockheed Martin in terms of market share. Targeting new big-ticket contracts in emerging Asian markets and the Middle East will partly offset a smaller pipeline of work from the West but this strategy carries significant risks.

Instead, management should reconsider the company’s options to branch out of its core defence business. The failed merger last year with European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company would have allowed BAE to achieve just that by creating an industrial giant with significant revenue streams from both military and civilian aeronautics.

The deal did not happen for good political reasons, but it has not altered the fact, that to flourish, BAE Systems must diversify, becoming more of a multi-dimensional business, like its great rival Boeing.

Twitter’s path to profits remains unclear

In hatching Twitter, Nick Bilton’s account of the soap opera behind the social network’s phenomenal growth, there’s a central argument: is Twitter about what each of its users is doing, or about what each of its users can see?

Is it, in other words, about the world or the individual? From the moment the microblog goes public, it’s no longer about either: it is about shareholders.

That does not mean the death of the service as its millions of users know it – Facebook, after some hiccups, is successfully working out how to sell adverts and also serve its more than a billion friends. But it does mean an evolution that will surely see more adverts on Twitter, because the site must, finally, turn a profit if it is to keep its investors happy.

And Twitter must also work out how it can continue to evolve: is it simply a 140-character window on the world, with advertisers occasionally peering in, or will it add more from its Vine video-sharing app and from other media? What about audio and about making more of the links that so many users share via Twitter? All of these and more require attention.

Much of Facebook’s success comes from the ease with which it allows users to build an entire online persona, with pictures, friends, family and more all neatly corralled under a single heading. It knows so much about its users that advertising is potentially sophisticated.

But Twitter is a platform for discussion, celebrities, campaigners and retailers: when it was growing, they were the people who helped it gain popularity. As it matures, and as shareholders make demands, the site must decide if people, especially those who get so much out of it, should be entitled to it for nothing.

The site’s path to serious profitability is the hardest to predict of all the dotcom flotations, and it has yet to indicate that it has sophisticated answers.